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Canonical to disable GNOME donations in Banshee

The Banshee developers have announced that they have chosen to allow Canonical to disable the Amazon store in Banshee on Ubuntu. This was the alternative to agreeing to have Canonical take 75% of the revenue from the affiliate code embedded in media player's Amazon store support.

Last August, the Banshee developers configured the media player's Amazon store support with an affiliate code which sent all the funds raised from referrer payments to the GNOME Foundation. According to the developers, this year they are expecting this to raise $10,000 for the Foundation, a level which is similar to the donations expected from a small company sitting on the GNOME advisory board.

Canonical, having chosen Banshee to be the next default media player in Ubuntu, wanted to mitigate the affect it would have on its own Ubuntu One music store. The Banshee developers were offered two options. One was to disable the Amazon store by default and leave the affiliate code in place; the store would be "easily enabled", but not offered as a default. The other option was to leave the Amazon store enabled but change the affiliate code so that Canonical took 75% of the revenue.

The Banshee developers "opted unanimously to decline Canonical's revenue sharing proposal", and so, unless Canonical changes its position, the Banshee Amazon store support will be disabled by default. The developers say their decision is supported by the GNOME Foundation's board. In the comments, when challenged on the 75% cut requested, Mark Shuttleworth said it was "consistent with the relationship we have with Mozilla".